blogging::in quest of Innovation

Menu

OpenVR – 3 : Aftermath

For past 3 days, OpenVR received massive public attention. My hosting package couldn’t handle this and went down a few times.

I received a warning email from Hostgator;

Your account has been abusing CPU resources for an extended period of time. As a result all of your sites have been cached in order to ensure continued performance stability of the server.

So I will be switching to a new hosting as soon as I can, to avoid such problems. I’m considering buying a VPS. I have been recommended to switch to digitalocean, but I haven’t made a final decision yet.

So what caused all this?

I built an Oculus Rift-clone a few months ago. I was planning to write a guide about it. I finally had time to finish and publish it. It took about 4-5 hours to finally write it all down. It was 04:00 am, when I finished writing.

The next morning, I woke up and started sharing it. I posted it on HackerNews and /r/Oculus first. For the first several hours, its score was between 2-6 points. Then it skyrocketed and went on the front page of the HackerNews. By then it had 25-30 points. It was #4 on the front page of HN.
My excitement was beyond measure. My post was just 4 lines below the blog post of Elon Musk. If you don’t know him. He is like a God to Geeks, or a living legend. I’m a huge fan of his work and his worldview. Afterwards, score went up to 67, while the entry kept moving up and down between #4 – #20.

Then I submitted my guide to Hackaday. I also contacted Make Magazine to see if they would be interested in sharing it.

Meanwhile, my blog started giving internal server error. My hosting package wasn’t capable of handle such huge demand. But it was only for a few minutes.

Then I thought, if people are so much interested in this, I should share more. So I posted it on following subreddits: Gaming, Arduino.
While all this happening, I was also monitoring realtime stats via Clicky. Stats were all going insane. I was really excited by this massive interest.

Then I saw an incoming link from Hackaday. Obviously, they wrote about my guide. I went on to check it out. It was an awesome article. I really like the way they convey the story.

Afterwards, I tweeted about OpenVR to John Carmack, Palmer Luckey, Massimo Banzi. Apparently, Palmer doesn’t use his twitter much because his last tweet was several weeks old. But John Carmack responded to my tweet!!!
“Excited” is not enough to describe my feelings about this. A moment of John Carmack probably worths millions. He didn’t just retweeted or answered shortly. He spared some of his precious time to read through my guide. Then he gave a good technical advice.

And after a few minutes, Massimo Banzi retweeted my OpenVR tweet. He is the co-Founder of Arduino. I have been a great fan of Arduino since I was 16. So it really meant a lot to me.

After Massimo’s retweet, it spread and reached some italian journalists. They also retweeted OpenVR. It received more and more attention.

Later, it reached to Russian community by an article on Xakep.ru;http://xakep.ru/62636/I also received huge amount of interest from vk.com but since it is a social network, I couldn’t pinpoint the origin of interest via stats.

So it was published in 3 different languages on major websites. It received attention of John Carmack and Massimo Banzi. Briefly, It was very exciting past 2 days.

I met some really nice people. It was really rewarding. I hope OpenVR helps other VR enthusiasts to build their own VR headsets. I’m hoping others those build and improve upon OpenVR may share and feedback their findings to VR community.

Thank you all, for your interest!

UPDATE :

It is now featured in many languages; Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Dutch and so on…

I had an interview with Hardware+ Magazine, and on this month’s printed edition they have 2 pages on OpenVR: